Hypotheticals and hindsight are not typically the favoured topics of the professional sports team but there is an alternative England scenario worth pondering. Had Sam Curran been fully fit to bowl ahead of this Pakistan series, the likelihood is that the Surrey all-rounder would have earned a recall to the Test squad for the first time in five years, a replacement of sorts after Ben Stokes had gone down in a blaze of gory batting at Trent Bridge.
Would Curran have featured in England's XI? The **** umption must be that he would not have but the very fact that he was under consideration at all shows the tricky question that Joe Root's side were attempting to answer. How does one replace the irreplaceable? Well, it seems, the answer is to not replace Stokes at all. There is no point, of course, selecting a seam all-rounder when you have specialists bowling the way that England's pace foursome have in this series so far.
England wrapped up a speedy victory over Pakistan at Lord's (Getty)
One must weigh Pakistan's paucity as mitigation against declarations of the brilliance of this attack but the evidence is increasingly persuasive about the group's potential. After the Headingley Test, Root had declared that the quartet of Ollie Robinson, Jofra Archer, Josh Tongue and Gus Atkinson did not know how good they could be and another standout showing at Lord's will not dim his praise. Of all English bowlers in Test history, Root can currently call upon three of the five men with strike rates beneath 44 and still have Archer to spare; if the fast forwarding of Test cricket is partly to blame, any skipper would enjoy that sort of potency.
"Each day it will be someone else's turn," Archer said during the second Test. "Everyone is relentless, everyone wants wickets and it feels like no-one is ever going to be overworked because everyone shares the overs out. You don't have to do too much because someone is going to back you up until you find your feet again."
#Pakistan
Would Curran have featured in England's XI? The **** umption must be that he would not have but the very fact that he was under consideration at all shows the tricky question that Joe Root's side were attempting to answer. How does one replace the irreplaceable? Well, it seems, the answer is to not replace Stokes at all. There is no point, of course, selecting a seam all-rounder when you have specialists bowling the way that England's pace foursome have in this series so far.
England wrapped up a speedy victory over Pakistan at Lord's (Getty)
One must weigh Pakistan's paucity as mitigation against declarations of the brilliance of this attack but the evidence is increasingly persuasive about the group's potential. After the Headingley Test, Root had declared that the quartet of Ollie Robinson, Jofra Archer, Josh Tongue and Gus Atkinson did not know how good they could be and another standout showing at Lord's will not dim his praise. Of all English bowlers in Test history, Root can currently call upon three of the five men with strike rates beneath 44 and still have Archer to spare; if the fast forwarding of Test cricket is partly to blame, any skipper would enjoy that sort of potency.
"Each day it will be someone else's turn," Archer said during the second Test. "Everyone is relentless, everyone wants wickets and it feels like no-one is ever going to be overworked because everyone shares the overs out. You don't have to do too much because someone is going to back you up until you find your feet again."
#Pakistan
11 days ago
